[Editor’s Note: This and subsequent excerpt parts are from the anthology entitled Wounded Feminine: Grieving with Goddess, published by Girl God Books (2024).]
Woven On Water
Claire Dorey
Today I cut your body down. Rope round your neck. Lips still warm. Today you peeled your soul away. You hung your wings up. Now you’re free.
If I was asked to describe grief, I’d say it was more mist than colour, wisps of mist coiling beneath a powder-white sky. Grief is Psyche, beating her wings in a winter-bone tower, dreaming a dream within a dream, blurring the edges with whispers of cobweb, muffling sound, dimming the spark, withdrawing from colour on a morning that refuses to wake.
“It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order.” –Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouze. The nation grieved by shaming her.
The grief I describe in this story is one of escalation, slow burn to full throttle, a catastrophic climax to falling in love for the first time. Boundaries were gate-crashed. Life-force was sucked. Passion and spirit were stamped on. Relentless punishment was inflicted on the one in the firing line. He eclipsed her with his pocket full of dark whilst she grieved the lover she used to have, absorbing his black moods, knowing he was suffering.
There was a lot of noise. Then silence.
A still-life etched into memory – the moment she found his body hanging from the willow tree, toes in the water, rope round his neck, lips still warm.
It’s.
No words.
And guilt.
Psyche and her grief, weighted with survivor’s guilt, slip out of the tower into a pocket full of dark, on a heavy woolen coat, with the collar turned up. She retreats into winter, ice-mottled toes treading the path of love and loss into trance, disassociation, abandonment and uncoupling. Shutting down, heart locked in a box, within a box, within a box, weeping on the inside, she’s sleepwalking into process, subconsciously spiralling into the mists of the Otherworld.
Grief is aloneness and speaking with ghosts on the shore of the swimming pond, soul following another soul, still visible in the gloom, yet beyond reach. Toes in the water, wet woolen coat pulling her down, Psyche seeks liminal time for a diaspora of thoughts so she can scream, ‘WHY?’
Across the pond the Swan Maidens hang their wings up in the branches of the willow tree. They swim out to the mermaids, skin and scale glinting in the water, laughter creating ripples – the language that bonds women. Now is the time for Psyche to swim across the pond to the pod of divine aquatic creatures, or rather now is the time for the Divine Feminine within us all to swim to the shadow woman, in the black coat, before the weight of sorrow-soaked wet wool drag her down to the lake bed.
There is violence in grief, a rattling, a stiffening, a peeling away of soul from soul in an eternal scream. Words stick in the throat in an indescribable knot of pain and emotion. Unravelling thoughts are patched with scraps of love, obsession and anger, thread by thread, sigh by sigh, affirmation by affirmation.
“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.” -Sylvia Plath
The mermaid who grieved with God was snared in a net and sentenced to a life in the black coat. She was forced to take the name of the father and shamed with original sin. Patriarchy has done terrible things to vulnerable women. Predators tune in. Some want your body. Some want your soul.
“Patriarchy is an integral system of interlocking oppressions, enforced through violence. The whole of the patriarchal system is legitimated by patriarchal religions.” -Carol P. Christ
As captives of this system, how can women defend the space they need to ‘process’ when their life-force is dimmed? How can women make sense of the ‘unbearable painfulness of being’ when ‘male-theism’, which fears emotion and shames the vulnerable, is the framework? This monoculture we survive, where public and psychological space are still male space, denies Female Experience and traps women’s essence, as if it were a moth in a jar. Society has cut itself in half and ripped out its mother’s tongue. Only male language is spoken.
I like to think that someone, somewhere, is cancelling Aristotle – drawing a big, fat line through the crass bits, making his man-centric ramblings fit for purpose. When he said women were fake, idle and inferior to men the ‘cult of patriarchal philosophy’ lapped it up. They wrote over women’s voices and ‘debated’ women’s experience out of existence. It wasn’t always so.
“I am Isis, the Goddess, the owner of magic, who performs magic with powerful speech and with chosen words.” -Isis, Spell 14 of the Metternich Stela[1]
There’s nothing new about cancel culture. Isis, the Goddess who spoke most in ancient texts, was ‘cancelled’ by phallocentric scribes. They ‘re-wrote’ her as Mary, silently weeping a blood-tear, the only language ‘male-theism’ permitted her. Song, chatter and laughter are such a powerful part of women’s cultural and clan identity. Historically women were forbidden from making a sound in Catholic Churches. Mutilated boys – castrato – replaced women’s voices. The Isis Osiris myth shows how women, not weighed down by the patriarchal black coat, mourned with words and action, not silent subjugation.
I believe Mary is Goddess in mourning. The Wounded Feminine is an archetype in anguish, describing deep psychological, emotional and spiritual scarring of a generational trauma created by the patriarchal betrayal of women, a cycle in perpetuation. Women’s Grief Cup is full.
The mermaids broke the cycle by removing themselves from ‘male-theist’ space to Female Space. They found their tribe and retreated to the sea, a sometimes metaphorical and esoteric Grief Space, where they consciously un-remembered the stories (lies) patriarchy told about women. Through meditation, the female narrative, one of wisdom, agency and authority, buried in the deep subconscious, revealed itself – ancestral memory resides in the mother-line. By focusing the lens on patriarchy’s descent into tyranny the mermaids worked through the resultant shock and denial underpinning the female condition – a wounding stored deep within our psyche and body.
Goddess understands how Grief Stress wounds the body-mind, including the hypothalamus, gut, ovaries and womb. Our internal systems – endocrine, immune, nervous, cardiovascular – are knocked off balance. If you grieve with Goddess she won’t ‘confuse’ empathy with eternal damnation and silencing, She’ll give you space to wail into the abyss like the Banshees did; go to the places in your head you need to go to; write love letters to the soul; wade through the blame, betrayal and PTSD; built a new life; laugh with your soul sisters, and through ceremony, tune into your own divine nature.
Float, float, float away. So why am I directing a story about grief to the waterways? Perhaps it is because both women and sea are places of cycles and emotion, in conversation with the moon, beyond the control of men, who feared them both.
“What can’t be said will be wept.” -Sappho
There is a symbiotic relationship between water and grief. Grief washes over us in waves. Water molecules respond to sound and emotion. Water holds memory. Springs and fountains are symbols of the Goddess of knowledge, Mnemosyne, whose name means ‘memory’. When we are sad, we talk of riding waves of emotion, floods of despair, crying rivers, downpours and tears and washing away sadness.
“Since the whole world is woven back and forth on water, on what, then, is water woven back and forth?” -Gārgī Vācaknavī, approx 800 BCE
Vac means ‘speech’. So here is a razor-witted, woman philosopher, pre-dating Aristotle, getting to the heart of human existence.
Vācaknavī’s question is a clever one. It guides us to: the amniotic womb space; the primordial egg with the chaotic waters of Nu inside it; Thalassa, primordial Goddess, who’s body is sea-water; Venus, Goddess of love, emerging from sea foam; Melusine, the mermaid spirit of fresh water in holy wells and rivers; the Selkies, shapeshifting seal women who can shed their seal skins and live on land; the Swan Maidens who shape-shift from woman to swan; Sulis, Goddess of healing and thermal springs; the Naiads, water nymphs, living in rivers, springs, lakes and marshes; Asherah, Queen of Heaven and Lady of the Sea; Atargatis, mermaid Goddess of love and life-giving water; Goddess of rain and midwifery Ixchel, who took the form of a jaguar; the Mermaids, music lovers with magical and prophetic powers; and the Sirens, who’s hypnotic songs mesmerise and anaesthetise.
The Goddess Vac sang the OM of creation – the first ecstatic experience emerged from the Divine Feminine. ‘Vāc’, the philosopher, guides us to the primordial waters of femaleness. The wisdom, memory and knowing embodied in water, expressed in the mythology of these shamanic and divine, aquatic creatures, is of higher vibration: love, healing, purification, transcendence and transformation. Grief can turn into other things.
Wild swimmers throw themselves into the icy pond, heart shuddering, lungs bursting with a mighty gasp. Psyche, who understands her limits, stays in the nymph pool, approaching cold water with respect and trepidation. Immersing herself slowly, she savours and fears the sensation of blood, adrenaline, endorphins and emotion, pumping through toes, fingertips and skin. This experience, often described as a cold water reset, is a somatic experience. She feels alive. She’s screaming! Screaming is good. Trauma is shifting.
Water supports the body. Lapping waves subdue internal turmoil. Tides connect the body-mind to the cosmic. Water on skin blurs the edges between body and cosmos, reducing resistance and feelings of ‘aloneness’. Blowing bubbles, Psyche, glides like a Selkie, grief flowing between fingers like water. She’s swimming through emotion, swimming through ‘numb’, regulating breath, shifting the Samskaras of sadness. Psychological imprints in the neural pathways take the path of least resistance like water does. Psyche is replacing old sensations with new, peeling away ‘freeze’, shedding the black coat. This is tantra. This is OM. This is surrender to other dimensions of sensory experience.
The oldest mer-woman, the most fragile on land, is the strongest swimmer. She is the water-crone, the Goddess of the waves. Puckered and dimpled, she plunges into the water with a sense of silliness. There is no shame here. It’s a misty day. The powder-white sky merges with the powder-white sea. Even neon swimming caps fade to wisps. In the absence of visuals, this is an acoustic landscape, rippling with chatter and laughter. Tête-à-tête, the mer-women float and chat, exchanging the most intimate details of their lives.
Conversations with women are containers for wisdom, birthing words, cocooning emotion. Grief is about ‘holding on’ and ‘letting go’. Women who have worn the dark coat and ‘done the work’, by moving into the pain, have ‘gifted’ their wisdom in poems and novels.
“A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry…”
– Crossing The Water, Sylvia Plath
“The phoenix will take flight, Over the seas of grief, To sing her thrilling song…” -May Sarton, The Phoenix Again
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.” -Virginia Woolf
Sharing is healing. So is nurture. Self-expression is therapy. So is sitting by the river, where the wild garlic grows, casting imaginary flies to catch whispers of the ‘lost’ water Goddess. Self-care is Goddess. So is walking the shore, letting the mind drift. The legacy of female consciousness is in all water. Woman and Goddess are embedded in the psycho-emotional landscape of the natural world. Now is the time for small tasks – journalling, reading, walking in witness, letting the mind meander like water.
“You will go home again when the world knocks you down… Your mother will pamper you… You’ll make a practice of going home so she can liberate you again.” -Maya Angelou
Tune into the energy in temples built to honour Female Power. Isis heals with cool water. She has a shrine in Cosmic Mother, Hathor’s temple. Hathor is ‘opener of the wombs’. There are sacred pools in this temple, where, I like to imagine,
“Stars open among the lilies.” -Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water
Pilgrims plunged into these pools for healing. Ancient ‘spa days’ buzzed with song, dance, percussion, perfume, mantra, magic and lucid dreaming, steamily raising vibration, opening the womb space, asking stress to leave.
Ancient Egyptians associated the Tilapia fish with Hathor and rebirth. As Maya Angelou says, we all need to return home to Mother [to the amniotic womb space] from time to time. History shows us we must carefully choose whose hands we wrap around our heart. Grieve wisely and we can inhabit our shadow, using our disequilibrium and despair, to rearrange our reality and birth more creative versions of ourselves. Sooner or later, we will slip out of the dark coat, put our wings on and fly away. Embrace the shadow as it follows you, it is part of your soul journey and this knowledge is hard won.
[Tête-à-tête, means ‘head-to-head’, in French.]
[1] Spier, Jeffrey and Cole, Sarah E. Egypt and the Classical World: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Antiquity. Getty Publications. Jul 26. 2022.
Sources (Works cited)
Buckingham, Will. Gārgī Vācaknavī, the Eloquent Philosopher. Nov 26. 2020. Looking For Wisdom. lookingforwisdom.com/gargi/
Christ, Carol P. “Carol P. Christ’s Legacy: Patriarchy as a System of Male Dominance Created at the Intersection of the Control of Women, Private Property, and War, Part 2 by Carol P. Christ.” Feminism and Religion, Jan 24. 2022.
Plath, Sylvia. Crossing The Water. Oct 3. 2017, Faber & Faber.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Kukil, Karen V. Editor. Anchor, Oct 17. 2000.
Sarton, May. The Phoenix Again. Published by William B. Ewert, Concord, New Hampshire, 1987.
Spier, Jeffrey and Cole, Sarah E. Egypt and the Classical World: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Antiquity. Getty Publications. Jul 26. 2022.
Wolf, Virginia. “Craftsmanship,” a BBC radio address Woolf delivered on April 20, 1937.